Guys ive kegged many beers but this is a 1st. My pale ale and Wit are slush!. I’ve raised the temp in my keezer to 40 and they are slowly thawing. I also turned off the Co2 so at the moment they are not carbing up. Im hoping the beers will be ok. I opened one of the kegs making sure my hands were sanitized to check on the thawing. This really suck. Not sure why it happened. The keezer stays above freezing. Had to be a combo of the keezer and the cold Co2, but its never happened before.
Anyone ever have the happen and still have a good beer?
Dissolved CO2 depresses the freezing point - the kegs could very well have turned to slush when you opened them to take a look. It has happened to me with really cold soda, you open the lid and the whole thing turns to slush.
So put the CO2 back on, and try not to worry about it. I think it will be detrimental to those styles of beer, but you won’t know for sure until it is thawed.
I had 2 kegs freeze and didn’t realize it until they were empty of liquid. What I had created was ice distilled porter and Irish red ale and they were both delicious, but way stronger than I wanted.
I think if it was good before it will be good after, but it might be different. A friend of mine freezes his light lagers intentionally, he says they are much cleaner tasting after thawing. For pale ale and wit that might not be what you want so they may be a bit out of style. That’s doesn’t mean they’ll be bad though.
I had a keg of bitter freeze on me. Once it had thawed I drew what turned out to be very similar to a fine Bourbon. After a few mind-bending pints of that I realized the keg hadn’t thawed completely. Once it had thawed, what came out was more like Schlitz than any bitter but still drank well. 8)
Ice-cold beer is what I was raised on and the climate here is conducive to that, but turning the thermostat up a few degrees will help. I started serving my beer about 10 degrees warmer and haven’t had a freezing incident since.
Why are these beers freezing? Is it a malfunction of the freezer/temp controller? I’m switching from a fridge to a chest freezer and now I’m nervous my beer will freeze some random time…Maybe it’s from the keg sitting against the freezer wall? The freezer walls get pretty cold, I could see them partially freezing a keg, maybe.
Do you have a fan inside your keezer? That will even things out! The only time I had a problem with freezing was when my Ranco probe fell into the water on the freezer floor. Temp said 135deg, thermometer inside said 17. Best/clearest pilsner EVER!
In my case the temp probe on the controller got shoved against the inside wall of the freezer and it dropped the temp to around 20F for a few days before I realized what had happened. I had the probe in a piece of 1/2 inch tubing glued in the corner of the freezer, but I didn’t think to seal the bottom of the tubing and the probe fell out.